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Morning Meditation for the Season of Easter
May 23, 2025
Luke 13:6-9
Then Jesus told this parable: ‘A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, “See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?” He replied, “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig round it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.”’
1 Corinthians 3:10-15
According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building on it. Each builder must choose with care how to build on it. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw— the work of each builder will become visible, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each has done. If what has been built on the foundation survives, the builder will receive a reward. If the work is burned, the builder will suffer loss; the builder will be saved, but only as through fire.
Meditation by Glenn Beamer
As I’ve contemplated Jesus’ parable in Luke’s gospel and the passage in Paul’s letter, I’ve thought about the difference in nurturing living beings and developing inert objects. While the latter can reflect creativity, commitment, admiration they do not respond beyond what the artist, carpenter, or engineer invests in them. Animals and plants and people, however, respond to the spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and physical investments we make in them, and they can respond in ways that range from disappointing to affirming to genuinely rewarding.
Paul’s letter to the Corinthians calls us to contemplate that the foundations that have been laid before us and the foundations that we create now will shape what those who follow us have to work with. Part of the mystery of our faith is that we build upon the foundation of those who came before us, and we lay foundations for those who follow us. Although inert objects – churches, artwork, musical scores, and books – are not responsive in the way people are, they are the forums in which people will be constrained from their potential or thrive to their fullest and become who God wants them to be.
In Jesus’ parable the gardener is frustrated and ready to cut down the fig tree. Jesus tells him to nurture the tree for another year to allow it time to produce fruit. Jesus leaves the gardener and us with a call to patient faith. We do not know what happens in the next year – whether the tree produces figs or not, and whether the gardener deems them adequate or not. But the gardener will know that he has nurtured the tree for another year.
Jesus call to shepherd the living is also a call to patience. Today impatience is baked in to how we live – getting stuck at the Conshohocken curve, on-demand video streams failing, or not receiving a text reply within ten minutes. Jesus recommendation for a year of patience seems extraordinary, but many times we are called to greater patience. Jesus calls us to be patient with what has come before us, to be patient in the present, and to be patient about what is coming.
Joining Paul’s passage and Jesu’s parable enables us to understand that the foundations we create – legal, educational, civic, and ecclesiastic – shape the people who will grow up in our communities decades and centuries from now. My own perception is that we need to move away from foundations that result from “I win/you lose” thinking to a shared perception of how our decisions today can sustain and advance God’s peace in the future.
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